Cycle Oz Day 78 – Edith Falls

We had a short day planned as we wanted to take a side trip to Edith Falls. The boys had trouble sleeping and were up early and ready before me which had me all discombobulated! But I managed to pack up quickly and we cycled the 40km to the falls in less than 2 hours, despite all the hills. The Stuart Highway is getting hillier as we approach Darwin and the 20km side road was pretty hilly too.

We arrived at the little cafe, got drinks and then headed up to the swimming holes at the waterfall. There is access to a big pool just 100m away, but we decided to do a short walk to the upper pool. It was hot dry and dusty on the way up but it was only 1km so not hard.

We jumped straight in the water which was cool for the first few seconds and then became warm, it was difficult to swim as I haven’t used my arms for so long and I was really tired really quickly. I was missing my noodle. We left our tops on because we got burnt last time we went in the water and didn’t want to burn again, and the many bright red people were reason enough to keep our white bits out of the sun.

I carried my GoPro all the way only to find out it had run out of battery so no fun waterfall pictures this time. We hung out there for a little while but there was absolutely no shade, and there were also a lot of people. There are signs at the bottom asking people to protect the wildlife, not use soaps etc, but there was a layer of suncream floating on top of the water which made this wilderness pool a bit gross!

We went back down to the cafe and had some lunch before finding some shade to try and have a nap, but napping was impossible with the flies. They were awful. And whats worse than a fly? A fly that bites, and I had a lot of the biting ones come and bite me.

We decide to carry on cycling at 4pm. We didn’t want to stay at the campground there because it was $12 and it was packed full of people. The boys had a shower but I didn’t bother because I was sweating just sitting in the shade and I knew as soon as I got on the bike I would sweat even more.

We cycled to 20km back to the highway, at the start I felt awful, I had a pounding head and my legs we tired and achy, but I soon settled into it and we got there in 48 minutes, even with some brutal hills. There was minimal shade and 50 billion flies. I couldn’t stand them anymore, I was about to lose my mind if they landed anywhere on my face again, so I pitched my tent, positioned my bike so that my panniers were giving me some shade and lay in my tent.

The ground was hot and it felt like it was about 50º in my tent but at least there were no flies.

Only 275km to Darwin

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663 million people across the globe are living without access to clean, safe water. That’s 1 in 10 people. A child dies every 90 seconds from a water related disease. One third of the worlds population – 2.4 billion people – don’t have access to adequate sanitation.

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